I paid £39 for the Nik collection 1 in June 2018.
I also paid for DxO Photolab Elite.
I also paid for DxO Film Pack and DxO Viewpoint.
I also paid for DxO Photolab elite upgrade.
Now DxO want more money for the Nik upgrade than it cost to buy outright less than a year ago.
They want another £49.99 for Nik 2
Which will amount to a total spend in less than one year with DxO: £234
It would have cost £120 to subscribe to the Adobe photography plan over the same time span. I left Adobe because of the ridiculous subscription model - DxO advertised themselves as a viable alternative to the Adobe hegemony. I bought into that.
I chose Affinity as my PS alternative. Now I find DxO are supporting Adobe with Nik - but not Affinity.
What on earth are you playing at, DxO?
Please note - I have not included pertinent comment on the performance/bug issues from DxO software over the year.
I certainly understand your point of view. In the end, though, It come down to whatever works best for you. I have all the same DXO software as you, purchased at one time as a suite, and know very well that it costs much more than the Adobe CC plan. However I no longer use any Adobe apps, for reasons other than the subscription plan, I far prefer my DXO software for my particular workflow. I’ve tried virtually everything out there in the marketplace, and DXO works best for my needs. Because of that I feel it was money well spent for me.
DxO campaigned in their marketing last summer as an alternative to Adobe.
Wishful thinking didn’t feature in my decision to take DxO marketing promises at face value. They are a commerical enterprise after all selling product.
They are not politicians - who I would know to be sceptical of as soon as their lips move.
I appreciate your frustration, but it’s only fair to point out that what you spent in a year on DxO software isn’t what you’d be likely to spend EVERY year. So far, only PhotoLab has been updated every year. Updates to ViewPoint 3 have been free, as have updates to FilmPack 5. Nik might be updated regularly, who knows - but I don’t consider adding Nik 2 to the full Photo Suite with Nik 1.1 a real value-add. So it’s not true that “annual costs [are] close to double that of the Adobe photography plan.”
The only evidence I have is my experience of the last (expensive) year. What’s the evidence to support your claim that the user base should NOT expect it every year? And I say that in the hope that I’m very wrong, and you are absolutely right.
However, it’s not all negative - there have been crucial performance gains/updates along the way and I’m really very pleased with how Nik 1 is performing within the 2.3 update to Photolab Elite so far.
I’ve been using and upgrading DxO software for five years. I bought upgrades of OpticsPro/PhotoLab on sale three times and never saw anyone penalized more money for skipping a year. I bought an upgrade of ViewPoint once and have only used FilmPack 5. Nik 1.1 was given to me, but even if I bought it I’d be saving money. I see no reason to add Nik 2, because that only adds hi-def monitor support & a bunch of presets and recipes. It comes with PhotoLab 2 Essential Edition, which can be upgraded to Elite for less than full cost (you and I have Elite already, so no need to buy it again). As OpticsPro and PhotoLab were updated with support for new cameras and lenses at a cost, ViewPoint and FilmPack (including older versions) got free updates for compatibility.
Does this mean the trend will continue in the future? No, but one can’t state something that hasn’t happened yet as fact, let alone a trend.
For what it’s worth, you appear to have actually paid for two product cycles in the course of a year (buying PhotoLab Elite and then buying its upgrade) - so what you’ve bought doesn’t describe an annual cycle at all.
I hope this gives you sufficient reason to be optimistic.
Isn’t the larger question about how useful~valuable a tool is rather than how much it costs?
If I’m spending $1000 dollars on a piece of software but it allows me to bring in 10x the revenue I’d say it’s a good deal. Obviously this is a simplistic example to illustrate the point.
I use both Adobe & DxO products because they allow me to create images that my clients’ find useful to their businesses.
On the flip side, I have not upgraded to PL2 (from v1) because it did not offer any additional useful features for my work.
Evaluate things as we go and decide what the cost~benefit is rather than an absolute number.
Big difference between upgrading DxO and Adobe’s subscription.
You don’t need to upgrade DxO to continue to use it. It won’t suddenly stop working or go into limp mode when a new version comes out. Plenty of people are still on PL1 and OptixPro.
Stop paying Adobe and their software will have veery reduced functionality. As far as I am aware, only the library module will work and allow you to export. No more develop module. No more advanced RAW editing.
What is complicated? You just click on the Nik button in DPL, the raw gets exported as a tiff and you are there?
I personally prefere to work in the standalone mode though
If part of the decision to move to DxO is cost (and it was) then it cannot be ignored as a factor while the costs (surprisingly and unexpectedly) mount.
The cost of the Nik 2 upgrade is more than buying it outright was less than a year ago.
But, you are right - it is also about function and to that end, I’m still with DxO.
When working with Affinity and the (then) free Google Nik - the filters were available in the affinity plugin menus. Hugely powerful and functional.
Then DxO bought the software - encouraged users to upgrade and now the filters only partially work in Affinity. What price a degraded functionality - when DxO themselves were encouraging users to make the shift?
